Back in 2007 the American studies scholar Richard H. King was wondering if those in his field had paid enough attention to religion in the modern US. Perhaps researchers had overstated the significance of the secular left and various social- and cultural-liberation movements, he suggested. Said King, “most of the efforts to understand contemporary American society and culture as the site of the postmodern have largely ignored the growth of conservative forms of religion in America.” He also thought that “liberal historians have until only recently largely ignored the emergence of a religiously-saturated conservative politics, except to bemoan it.”Footnote ¹

This roundtable follows up on King's line of questioning and looks into the current, extensive research on American religion. Participants below ask question like: what recent developments are worthy of our attention? How does the focus on religion redirect our study of the United States? How has work on religious movements, influences, ideas, and practices shaped our understanding of literature, politics, race, film, and more? Several of the participants challenge others to branch out into other fields in order to better understand the subjects we study. Some describe the growing interest in religious and cultural studies and highlight scholarly developments that span the last century. Each tells us something about how American studies might look different with greater attention given to religion. This introductory essay is followed by contributions from Sandra Scanlon (University College Dublin), Paul Harvey (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), Abram Van Engen (Washington University in St. Louis), Uta Balbier (King's College London), Megan Hunt (Northumbria University), and Matthew Sutton (Washington State University). The participants gathered on a typically overcast, northeastern day in March 2015 at Newcastle University as part of Northumbria University's US History Research Group and Newcastle University's Americas Research Group. Along with those two universities, sponsors included Harvard University Press and the US Embassy, London.

It would be useful to begin by stating what might seem to be the obvious. The study of religion is not the same as religious advocacy or boosterism. It is not indoctrination or preservation. Scholars tend not to plead for the maintenance or celebration of religion. Those who study religion in the academy are, for the most part, critics who consider how religion works and what religion means.Footnote ² That is especially important in the American context. Boston University religious historian Stephen Prothero pointed this out in the same year that King offered his thoughts on the place of religion in the modern US. “Religion has always been a major factor in US politics and international affairs,” said Prothero. He goes on to note,

To borrow from the title of a very influential book on religion in colonial America, Americans seem to be awash in a sea of faith.Footnote ⁴

But there is considerable debate about how to make sense of that faith and just how it has washed over Americans. How does religion operate? How do scholars make sense of belief and practice? What role does religion play in society? The sociologist Jean-Pierre Reed recently observed that some Western scholars still treat religion as “an ideology of domination that reifies social reality into an unchangeable given and justifies the status quo.” Says Reed, “In many historical cases the authority of those in power has been legitimated by religious doctrine, and as such, it has been used to oppress the peasantry and the working class (Bourdieu, 1991), women (French, 1992), and people of color (Kiernan, 1995).”Footnote ⁵ Other factors have been at work, which have made religion seem like an unworthy topic. In the mid-1980s the historian Leonard I. Sweet pointed out scholars’ dislike of conservative religion. Historians were not drawn to study that with which they had so little connection and/or sympathy, he reckoned.Footnote ⁶ More than a decade later the historian of Catholicism John T. McGreevy pointed to something else to help explain the lack of interest in religious subjects. Historians’ primary narrative for the post-Civil War era, he observed, had either been political (the growth and impact of a liberal, activist government) or organizational (the bureaucratization of American life). Religion did not quite fit that picture.Footnote ⁷

Some years ago I asked Prothero why he thought so many in the humanities had been slow to recognize the place of religion in American life. “Because academics are secularists,” he shot back. “And I think we all have the tendency to extrapolate from our own experience,” he reasoned. “So you have a bunch of professors at Harvard or Princeton who aren't moved by religion, and they find it hard to imagine anyone else who is. The academy, the law, and the media are the three strangely secular areas of American culture.”Footnote ⁸

The absence of religion in American history once had many sources. But one of the most important may have to do with what historians or American studies scholars were naturally drawn to. The religious historian Matthew S. Hedstrom notes the decline of religion in academic circles in twentieth-century America. “The United States has yet to experience mass secularization, such as occurred in northern and western Europe after World War II,” says Hedstrom, “yet American intellectuals did indeed shed their religious commitments in great numbers over the last century.” He concludes, “The loss of religion's intellectual standing in the twentieth century had consequences for all fields of history, but most especially for intellectual history. Put simply, religion nearly vanished from the historiography of modern America.”Footnote ⁹

Regardless of whether religion works as a force of political resistance, speaking truth to power, in the words of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, or serves as a bulwark of conservatism, religious communities, movements, and individuals deserve to be studied because of their prevalence on the landscape of American culture. Today there are fewer and fewer off-hand dismissals of religion as a serious topic of study. That could be explained by any number of recent trends and events. The secularism predicted with such confidence by sociologists and humanists in the 1960s failed to materialize. In fact, religious observance and the place of religion in the public spotlight only grew from the 1970s forward.

Since September 11, 2001 the study of American religion – through literature, history, sociology, politics, film, and a host of other fields – has been booming. That might have been surprising news to scholars fifty years ago. In the 1960s renowned sociologists like Peter Berger predicted that America would become more and more like secular Europe. Organized religion, he told the New York Times in 1968, was headed for “self-liquidation.” That, of course, did not happen. In the coming decades Berger made an about-face. “[T]he assumption that we live in a secularized world is false,” as he bluntly put it in the late 1990s. “The world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was.” Now scholars and journalists are asking how this upsurge in religious belief and practice relates to standards of tolerance, ethnic identity, and political engagement. Stanley Fish sensed the growing importance of religion in the wake of 9/11: “When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.”Footnote ¹⁰

Historians of late have explored Mormonism and the law, the invention of religion as a special category of study, religion and the labor movement, and the intersection of pop culture and religion, to name just a scant few areas of fruitful study. The list of current research topics and rewarding areas of scholarship is too long for an essay of this size. I would like to focus, then, on just some promising research and then draw on the wisdom of other scholars in the field to think about how the study of American religion has changed in recent decades.

Historians and religious studies scholars are shedding new light on some old subjects. Judging from recent scholarship on mainline, liberal protestantism, to paraphrase Mark Twain, news of the mainline's death has been greatly exaggerated. The chief denominations include Episcopal Church, United Church of Christ, Methodist, Lutheran, and Unitarian. Yet one of the major religious trends of the second half of the twentieth century was the steady numeric decline of such groups, coupled with the rise in conservative evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. New research on establishment Protestantism and liberal theologians, though, is recasting the recent past. Icons of mid-century religious liberalism – including Martin Luther King Jr., Letty Mandeville Russell, James Pike, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr – still exert their influence in the years and decades after their deaths. (One could add to this Catholics like Rosemary Radford Ruether and Dorothy Day.) The continued relevance of liberal Christianity is grounded in Americans’ changing ethics and value structures. The causes that liberals championed so fiercely in the postwar years – ecumenism, disarmament, civil rights, feminism, and economic and social equality – now have much wider appeal than they had fifty years ago.Footnote ¹¹ Recent books on the impact of liberal Protestant publishing and book culture, as well as ones on the continued relevance and influence of the mainline, are reshaping the field.Footnote ¹² Much of this research shows how liberal Christianity has endured in spite of its institutional decline. Intellectual historian David Hollinger argues,

With this legacy in mind it is not surprising that Barack Obama has called Niebuhr his favorite theologian.Footnote ¹⁴

The new work being done on old-guard Protestants and their disgruntled fundamentalist cousins, of course, represents only a fraction of the field. (Matthew Sutton summarizes the latter in his contribution to this roundtable.) Other leading scholars in religious studies and history are calling for a shift away from Protestantism and evangelicalism, or the so-called main currents of American religion. In 2011 a group of scholars – including Robert A. Orsi, Richard L. Bushman, Wallace Best, Lila Corwin Berman, and Catherine L. Albanese – came together at the American Historical Association meeting in Boston to consider what the field would look like with a focus “Beyond the Protestant Nation.” Albanese argued that the “‘Protestant-nation’ historiography delivers an impoverished account of what went on in the past and what is going on today.” That standard narrative, she thought, obscured mystical religious experiences, the occult, spiritualism, and the more amorphous nature of religious influence and affiliation. The attention of others in the roundtable turned to Catholics, Mormons, and African American religious dissenters and skeptics. Berman asked what it would be like if scholars read American Jewish history as going “against the grain of certain fundamental assumptions in United States historiography.” Jewish history had far too often been, she thought, viewed through the lenses of assimilation, Protestant-centered ideas about spirituality and renewal, Christian church organization or theology. As a result, the story of Judaism was too often colored with Protestant tones. Developments within Jewish history that did not fit the pattern were ignored. Orsi aptly described such erasures in relation to Catholics. Literary scholars and historians write about American cities with scant attention to Catholicism. Others study the lives of artists and activists – Robert Crumb, Mario Savio, Andy Warhol, Phyllis Schlafly, and William Buckley – with equal inattention to the tradition. “The absence of Catholics from so much U.S. history,” remarked Orsi, “represents the radical constriction of what is meant by ‘religion’ in the study of the American past, of what sorts of religious behaviors are to be taken account of and which are to be disciplined by excision from the story.”Footnote ¹⁵

Beyond these brief observations there are myriad ways that the field has been changing in recent decades and years. In conclusion I would like to turn to the insights of religious studies scholars and historians I have recently interviewed. I have asked each of them the basic question: “What do you think is different about the field now compared to when you completed your graduate work?”Footnote ¹⁶ The interviewees range from senior to more junior scholars, men and women, whose work stretches across space and time. Several considered the shift to new subjects and new ways of writing about them a major change. Peggy Bendroth, who specializes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, remarks, “The new project was to understand religious belief and behavior in all its wild diversity. The experiences of previously unknown people, like fundamentalist women, were suddenly important, as windows into an American religious culture far more complex and diverse than most scholars had been willing to guess.” That was reiterated by Kate Carté Engel, a colonialist, who thinks the kinds of topic and movement being studied have expanded tremendously. The field, she observes, has also benefited from the renewed interest in religion within the historical profession.Footnote ¹⁷

Others have been struck by the multidisciplinary turn as well as the attention to areas of life neglected by a previous generation of scholars. Those who study material culture, sensory history, the neuroscience of religion, or new media are now more commonly integrated into the field. Judith Weisenfeld thinks this openness has something to do with the turn to so-called “lived religion” and popular expressions from the 1990s forward. Candy Gunther Brown agrees that this marked a watershed in the study of American religion, taking in how diverse groups and individuals experienced faith on a day-to-day basis. “Christian denominations were still front and center,” she says of the early 1990s when she was completing her graduate work, “and we were just discovering the voices of those who weren't clergy, men, white, and Protestant.”Footnote ¹⁸ David Morgan of Duke University, who specializes in religion and visual culture, sums up this new work. “We pay much more attention to everyday things,” he observes, “to music, to clothing, to images, to food. We are not stuck on fine art or geniuses or blue chip theologians or grand narratives or the Protestant mainstream, or any notion of a ‘dominant culture.’”Footnote ¹⁹

With this kind of vibrant, expansive interest in subject matter and the assistance of ethnography, cultural studies, and history it is easy to see why the field has grown so much since the late 1990s. In 2009 the American Historical Association (AHA) reported that for the first time “religious history recently surpassed all other topical categories in our annual look at AHA members, raising interesting questions about what is attracting fresh interest in the field.” Ranking below “religion” were “social,” “cultural,” and “political” history. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the subfield of religious history continues to grow. In December 2015 the AHA's “survey of 40 years of field specializations” showed that “diplomatic, economic, and intellectual history” had fallen “to less than half of their percentages among faculty 40 years earlier.” Over those same four decades the number of historians specializing in religion had grown by 147 percent.Footnote ²⁰ Where the study of American religion will take scholars in the coming decade – whether that includes greater concentration on transatlantic currents, religion and the environmental crisis, the blurring of the lines of sacred and secular, comparative secularism, or the neuroscience of religious experience – is more difficult to gauge or guess. The contributions that follow suggest ways that American studies could be enriched by greater attention to religion and they offer insight into what we might gain in such efforts.